Mixed Media
Heather A. Hoeksema’s Singular Butterfly: Verse 3/3
Singular Butterfly: Verse 3/3, Heather A. Hoeksema’s second book, focuses on the territorial ownership of nature. That “tends to fall into three categories,” she said, “and they are what also tends to cause war: the territorial ownership of natural resources, including land; the territorial ownership of women and the element of the womb, which is the ownership of population — the ownership and control of reproduction — and the third is the territorial ownership of spiritual faith, which is a natural phenomenon.”
Hoeksema is an architect who practiced in Los Angeles and in the Midwest before changing her focus to writing and music, and hitting the road. She sold her house in LA last May and bought an old Airstream trailer. She signs copies of Singular Butterfly: Verse 3/3 at 2 p.m. Sunday, March 11, at Op.Cit Books in the DeVargas Center (157 Paseo de Peralta; 505-428-0321). Then, at 3 p.m. Sunday, March 18, she reads from Flash Light 9: Girls’ Stories for Grown Ups, a collection of short stories, at SOMOS, (108 Civic Plaza Drive, Taos; 575-758-0081).
Singular Butterfly, she writes in the book’s preface, is “a composition, a stitching together of years of research with the desire to convey a holistic way of understanding sustainable growth, at all scales.” And if you ask her about butterflies, be prepared. She may launch into an exposition about the insects’ wing structure or about her own version of the “butterfly effect” of chaos theory. “My book distinguishes between the modern butterfly effect and the holistic butterfly effect,” she said. “The modern butterfly effect is basically about how the artificial has developed from this folding and stretching in the chaos in the human environment because of the use of artificial mechanisms. And the holistic butterfly effect I consider the inverse, where we start to shape environments more tectonically so it doesn’t toxify and destroy the environment, but they actually start to work in harmony with nature.”
At the readings, Hoeksema may sing songs, too. “I’ll have my guitar; it depends on the vibe.” To witness her songs and writing, visit singular architecture.com. — Paul Weideman